MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

"... my printer refused to print the back of the bill, and gave me some websight about the illegal-ness of counterfeiting..." lol - is your printer connected to langley or something? Now you know why you spent so much money for your printer - they had to develop this nice feature >.< Anywa...

The only thing that makes significant noise (unless you shoot a block of gelatine), is the bullet that hits the target. And I think you can record that without a gun easily. EG take a wooden stick of about 1 meter lentgh, then hit a stack of newspapers as much as you can. Sounds pretty much like a s...

yes, vietnam sounds a lot like napalm. you may fill 1 part gasoline and 9 parts air into a balloon. You have to shake the ballon until most of the gasoline is evaporated inside the ballon, then ignite it with a flame, eg. a candle. Just make sure to stand far away when it is ignited (use some kind o...

I'd use a Miniature Model. they're pretty cheap. The only problem is the rotors, but you may add an electro motor to rotate the rotors (a real RC Helicopter may be the choice of real pro SFX, but it's too expensive). Then use thin nylon wires and a sky background. I wouldn't use bluescreen, instead ...

Why don't you buy a HDV camera then? Soon they are going to be standard and all miniDV Camera will become obsolete, no matter how expensive they where. With HDV you can downsample the format to NTSC Size in 4:4:4 Format! So you will be able to do decent chroma-keying. But make shure to read about th...

Chromanator is 50£ - pretty cheap. But you need to purchase online, something that I hate. ( http://fxhome.com/chromanator/ ) This still won't solve your CG background problem - what you need to do is set the background color to blue, by default the background (or "nothing") is black. I...

See the link to the download on free-codecs.com. the VP6 codec is a very good codec, it beats mpeg2, h264 and m$ media 9. You can save something in DVD quality with 3 or less MBits. and even in 1 Mbit it's still acceptable. Also, when you install DIVX 5.n, it will install the Google Toolbar Browser ...

good idea - tho "flowers inside the barrel" definitively didn't amuse our sarge... But flour is a good idea for BB-guns. or something even more lightweight, like powdered sugar.

Epsilon I've just uploaded a little Avi that shows the smoke. It's only 580 KB, vp6 encoded avi: http://www.melog.ch/movies/sig_smoke_vp6.avi ( In case you need the codec: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/VP6.htm ), tell me what you think about it. I agree, it looks weird - kind of like black pow...

The smoke depends a lot on the ammo. if it's greased, you see a lot smoke. also, if there's some cleaning spray (usually based on grease and alcohol) resides inside the barrel it produces a lot of smoke too. It's worst the first 10 or so rounds. So yes, basicly it's not the powder that maeks smoke -...

I just made this yesterday. It shows a SIG P220 in 9mm para and a CZ Scorpion in .32ACP. The Frames are taken right from the DV Tape, without any dropouts. You see, the flash isn't a real flash, The Scorpion even has no flash at all, but some sparks from burning bullet jacket particles (kind of a ba...

Well done, but still I'd say a moving slide is not required in normal speed video. I have just made some tests and it turned out that there is only a singe frame that shows the slide partially moved back (about 1 inch), and it's exactly the frame after the muzzle flash which is extremly motionblured...

yes, googles and gloves is good. Sorry, this putfile video thingy never works for me. I guess it's the opera browser.

thanks. tho currently the server seems to be down. I'll try again later.

There are zillions of Pictures of guns and bullets in the web, the shooter community uses the internet busily. If you want Matrix like fx, I agree, you need to use a 3D tool with a model of the Bullet, so you can display it from any wanted perspective. You may even use enviroment mapping on the bull...

I think it's horrible how people are handling these things. Did you know magnesium will continue burning even under water. So if you accidently powdered yourself with magnesium - no fun if you're once ignited. Also Black Powder can be ignited by sparks, friction and static electric charge. so when y...

Uh, seems like there ain't a big lot of people who care about the theory that much. I agree, if you're not programming codecs or apps then you don't need to know this. BTW this is no double post. If I ask a question and nobody answers, I don't give up so quickly and continue searching for answers. I...

yes, it's me. I know, not the prefect hero type guy, but you should see brad pitt proir cosmetics and corsage ;) Indeed, I am real happy with DrGreen's progress. Athough some things are very annoying, eg: I am using MCI SendString to control the source avi streams. MCISendString is a set of commands...

As Raptor said, as soon as you are using Chroma Keying, the artifacts will become very obvious. So try not to use it at all. If you have to use it for some reason, try to ship around the 4:2:0 and 4:1:1 Dilemma by using special software. There are some tool that are bluring the color information and...

there are some tools that let you model a mesh from multiple view angles, one is sculpt3d (or something similar), there was a free version 1 on a coverdisk of a 3D papermag sometime ago. Additionally I remember there's "photomodeller". Personally I even made myself a 3D scanner some time a...

The following Clip is encoded with the VP6 Codec. The codec is highly recommended and can be downloaded form here: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/VP6.htm Here's my muzzle fx test. Please note the white balance was not correct, and the background was recorded with a very cheap samsung camcorder....

I recently used to read some information about HDV that isn't that fluffy: It records in 4:2:0, the same as PAL miniDV. Although the resolution is higher, you still got color information only for every fourth pixel of each 2*2 pixel block. This may (again) result in problems with chroma-keying (bloc...

The panasonic NV GS 250 would be nice too, in that price range, IMHO.

Cool. I used to read somewhere MAGIX sucks when you have opened lot's of movie files in the timeline - is that true? (I didn't do anything complex so far, but curretly I am working on a real movie (well, 20 minutes or so, but a lot of material)).

Did you make anything complex using MAGIX yet?

Thanks for the Mic info - so it's the distance that can kill a Mic - makes sense. Yes, Flash suppressors. Some guy told me his .50 BMG Rifle without suppressor used to burn his hair when the wind was blowing in the opposite direction